Tag Archives: Noah

Changing the World One Apocalypse At a Time

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R. Fiore has an essay up on tcj.com about the Watchmen book and comic. He argues, in part that the movie’s weaknesses are those of the book.

the entire movie depends on an idea that became obsolete within a few years after the book came out, which is that nuclear war was such an imminent absolute threat that the only decent course was non-resistance to totalitarianism. What this in turn depends on is a failure to understand the difference between nuclear war and every other kind of war, which is regardless of who was left hobbling, the respective high commands could not hope to personally escape the consequences. Even if they were sheltered during the blast, all the comforts and riches of their capitols would be blasted away. But what really makes the whole idea empty is the belief that conflicts between peoples aren’t genuine, and that they could all be swept away by an imaginary bogeyman. This is an idea as juvenile as any that ever appeared in a comic book.

So first, I don’t think Watchmen is pro-totalitarianism (V is another story). Ozymandias and his final solution are undercut and questioned repeatedly, both by other characters and by the narrative itself. Rorscach and Dr. Manhattan both suggest, for different reasons, that destroying New York may not have been worth the candle, and the final page of the book indicates that the fate of the world hangs, not on Ozymandias, but on some moron with ketchup on his shirt. (If you want to see me natter on about this topic at greater length, you can read this and also this).

I have problems with several of Fiore’s other points as well. For example, if I understand his argument aright, he seems to be under the impression that, because nuclear war would kill everybody, the people in charge of the nuclear buttons would never actually press them. The whole cold-war paranoia thing was just a big dumb mistake; nobody was ever in any danger, since mutually assured destruction was absolutely fool-proof. The lesson of the end of the Cold War was that we never had to worry about the Cold War to begin with.

Fiore’s correct in some sense — if our leaders were rational, we needn’t have worried about nuclear war. The problem, of course, is that they weren’t particularly. I’ve read a bunch of accounts of the Cuban Missile Crisis (most recently one by Garry Wills) and I’m pretty convinced that John F. Kennedy was enough of a preening prima donna that he would have sooner destroyed the world than lose the news cycle. Thus, avoiding nuclear holocaust depended on…Khruschev. As it turned out, Khruschev was more level-headed than even a glass-half-full, turning-dog-turds-into-lemonade, off-to-join-the-Peace-Corps-and-frolic-with-the-happy-natives kind of optimist had any right to expect. But just because things worked out doesn’t mean that people weren’t right to be a little nervous.

I also disagree with Fiore’s contention that Watchmen misunderstands history and people. I mean, yes, obviously, the fake-space-alien-uniting-the-world is not especially probable. Among other things, the plot in the comic relies on the existence of psychic powers broadly distributed among the populace. And a guy who can catch bullets. And the existence of teleportation technology. Watchmen is many things, but a realistic narrative it is not.

But Fiore, obviously, is talking about more than that. He’s arguing that it’s ridiculous and childish to believe that conflicts between people can be swept aside by “an imaginary bogeyman.” He’s saying that miracles not only can’t happen, but wouldn’t work anyway because people are too set in their ways. Ultimately, Fiore seems to be skeptical not just of miracles, but of change.

Like Fiore, I don’t really believe in miracles, and I have my doubts about change. But I’ve been reading Terry Eagleton, who, as a Marxist, has a certain commitment to miraculous social transformation, and he does make you think. In his memoir The Gatekeeper, he discusses at length a Carmelite nunnery where he served as altar boy as a child.

What was most subversive about [the nuns], however, was their implacable otherworldliness. There are tough-minded types who believe that this world is the best we can muster, some of whom are known as materialists and the rest as conservatives. Whatever they call themselves, the hard-nosed realists who claim that there is no need for another world have clearly not been reading the newspapers…For [the nuns], the flaw of the world ran so deep that it cried out for some thoroughgoing transformation, known in their jargon as redemption. Short of this, things were likely to get a lot worse.

Fiore is one of those realists; he thinks the world is what it is. Moore, on the other hand, is suggesting that transformation is possible through a kind of apocalypse. Not Marxist revolution or Christian salvation, but something analogous; a global scale cataclysmic event, killing millions and shifting earth’s concept of its own place in the galaxy.

Contra Fiore, I think that such a massive event would actually really shake people up. 9/11 wasn’t as transformative as some like to claim, but it did succeed in concentrating a lot of minds. And the even Moore suggests would be much bigger — many more dead, and the sudden revelation of a hostile alien race. The only comparison would be the first European encounter with the Americas, which had massive psychological, spiritual, economic, and political consequences, to say the least. If you don’t think a bogeyman on the scale Moore propounds would be enough to change the world, it’s hard to say what would. Certainly, if you’re that assured of stability, it’s hard to see why you would think (as Fiore seems to) that George Bush could have made much of a difference one way or the other.

Moore does suggest that his particular miracle would require gallons and gallons of blood. His willingness to look at that unflichingly and unsympathetically is why Watchmen doesn’t end up endorsing violence or fascism. The revolution may really not be worth it; utopia isn’t necessarily grace.

The funniest thing about both sides of this argument, maybe, is that we know now that both Fiore and Moore are too pessimistic. Fiore argues that the cold war conflict was intractable; Moore argues that it could only be worked out by piling bodies like cordwood. And what happened instead (as Fiore at least should know)? The Cold War ended very rapidly and with (as these things go) little loss of life. Of course, the world isn’t all hunky-dory (and Moore didn’t say it would be.) But things do change, and not always for the worse.

Watchmen is, among other things, about the possibilities and perils of radical political change. It’s not a political treatise; it doesn’t present solutions to the problems it raises. But I don’t think it’s wrong in arguing that those problems could, perhaps, require transformative change, and in further suggesting that, for better or worse, such changes do occur. Fiore says that the plot of Watchmen is hard to believe, but, as Terry Eagleton notes the story of humanity is itself “grossly improbable.” The cynical view that tomorrow will be like today is in fact the most hopeless naivete — more naive, even, than trusting in our leaders not to kill us, or in believing that the fears of our parents were unreal because they no longer happen to be ours. Things do change, in large ways and small. The future is like the past only in being different from the present. Moore got that, which is why, even though its yesterday and tomorrow aren’t ours, Watchmen still seems up to date.

Utilitarian Review 2/6/10

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On HU
We started out the week with Adam Stephanides returning to xxxholic. He read the whole thing and eh. Could have been worse.

In memory of Howard Zinn’s passing, I sneered at the graphic adaptation of his book.

I mocked the prevaricating title of The Mammoth Book of Best New Manga.

And doing her part to convince Suat that people really do write mean things about manga, Kinukitty dumped on the yaoi Madness.

Vom Marlowe does her part as well by not much liking Book of Friends.

And finally this week’s download features women in extreme metal.

Utilitarians Elsewhere
On Splice Today I join the long line of those who have sneered at Pauline Kael.

In other words, Kael uses “we” because there is no “we”; the point for her is always self-referential; her thesis is always, “I am right.” And that solipsism is, in turn, a function, not of rampant egotism, but of the categories she uses. As “Trash, Art, and the Movies” suggests, Kael is obsessed with what is art and what isn’t art and with the evil “businessmen” who muck up everything and make it “almost impossibly difficult for the artists to try anything new.” To read Pauline Kael, therefore, is to be confronted with a capitalism whose worst sin is making mediocre movies; with a bourgeois society the worst sin of which is enjoying those same mediocre films. Smack dab at the end of the 60s, Kael has nothing to say about Vietnam, or Lyndon Johnson, or civil rights, or any of the cataclysmic upheavals of her day. She manages to write a review of Godard’s La Chinoise in which she explicates Godard’s feelings about revolutionary youth but doesn’t tell us anything about her own position except, “Yep, I think Godard is really clever!”

On Madeloud I look back at the Rolling Stone Record Guide from 1993.

Still, if the Album Guide isn’t exactly useful as reference anymore, it retains sentimental and historical interest. Consider, in 1993:

– Nirvana was a decent band peddling a more pop-laden version of the “metal-edged punk” that typified Soundgarden and Soul Asylum. “At their best,” J.D. Considine says, Nirvana’s songs “typify the low-key passion of post-MTV youth.” Bleach (three-and-a-half stars) is faulted for relying on “metal riffage” as much as on “melodic invention,” while the poppier Nevermind gets four stars. Since Nirvana has not yet been named rock royalty, no one needs to trace its bloodline, and bands such as the Melvins and the Vaselines don’t exist.

On Splice Today I have a review of the latest in dubstep meets doom metal by Necro Deathmort.

On Madeloud I review the quite-good-but-unfortunately-named Scandinavian thrash band Rimfrost.

Also on Madeloud I review the latest slab of endless doom from Holland’s Bunkur.

Other Links

Tom Crippen has been writing some great super-hero pieces on TCJ.com this week, including this sad song for MODOK. Also, a great discussion of Ebony White.

Jessica Hopper’s takedown of Vampire Weekend is nicely done.

Music for Middle-Brow Snobs: I’m a Plague

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This is a women-in-extreme-metal playlist. I believe Dickless, Gallhammer, Doughnuts, Astarte, and Murkrat are all-female bands; The Witches may have a guy on drums; the rest have one or two women (mostly keyboards and vocals, I think.)

Gallhammer is Japanese; Doughnuts are Swedish; Astarte is Greek; The Witches are French; Gehenna is I believe Norwegian; Murkrat is Australian. The rest are from the U.S., I’m pretty sure.

1. Dickless — I’m a Man (I’m a Man EP)
2. Dickless — Saddle Tramp (I’m a Man EP)
3. Gallhammer — Blind My Eyes (Ill Innocence)
4. Doughnuts — Impure (The Age of the Circle)
5. Astarte — Satisfaction of the Dead (Dancing in the Dark Seas of Evil)
6. Astarte — Deviate (Sirens)
7. The Witches — Black Sorcerer (Awakening: Females in Extreme Music)
8. Acrostichon — Pain (Awakening: Females in Extreme Music)
9. Thor’s Hammer — …in our Hands Alone (May the Hammer Split the Cross)
10. Gehenna — Unearthly Loose Palace (First Spell)
11. Noothgrush — Sysyphus Narrow Way (Erode the Person)
12. Murkrat — Plague Gestation (Murkrat)
13. Ludicra — Collapse (Fex Urbis Lex Orbis)

Download I’m a Plague.

Neither New Nor Manga — Discuss.

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Mammoth Book of Best New Manga
Ilya, ed.
Running Press

It’s rare to find a book with not one, not two, but three prevarications in its title. The Mammoth Book of Best New Manga is, in the first place, not manga — hardly any of the creators are from Japan (most appear to be from the U.S., England, and China.) And while some of the stories are obviously in the manga tradition, many of the others look like…just plain comics. Nor is the work in the volume necessarily “new” — the first piece, “Kitsune Tales” by Andre Watson and Woodrow Phoenix, for example, was published originally in 2003, five years before this volume’s 2008 copyright. And, finally, the volume is not a “best of” in any usual sense; the pieces weren’t selected from any defined pool that I can see. Rather, they seem to have been chosen from the author’s network of friends, acquaintances, and readings. In some cases creators came to his attention through contests he judged. A couple of the entries here are even submissions.

In other words, if, like me, you read the title and thought, “Hey, this is going to show me some of the most exciting work in Japanese comics created during the last year or so!” — well, you’re going to be seriously disappointed, because this ain’t that. Instead, it’s just another anthology, like Kramer’s Ergot or Mome, though in comparison to those two series it’s aimed at a younger, less artsy audience.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with anthologies per se. A pulpier, all ages Kramer’s Ergot — that’d be great. Unfortunately, the confusion evinced by Brand New Manga’s title seems to reflect, not only marketing gone haywire, but a general lack of editorial vision. Even when I don’t like Sammy Harkham’s selections (Kevin Huizenga…eh) they at least feel like conscious, idiosyncratic aesthetic statements. Whereas much of the material in Best New Manga seems to have been chosen at random.

Robert Deas’ “Infinity Rising,” for example, is entirely predictable space opera, complete with a torched farmhouse lifted from Star Wars, a gratuitous revenge motif, some gratuitous violence against women, and preposterous, pumped-up anatomy, digitally-colored so that the muscles look like hunks of plastic. Mitz’s “Pilot” is a by-the-numbers sci-fi YA kid-gets-super-powers story; it’s charming and competent, enough, sure, but it’s hard to see why an editor would jump up and say, “Yes, I must have this rather than all the other work that looks much like it!” Or again, Rainbow Buddy’s yaoi entry “Snowfall” shows some kid looking up and mooning enthusiastically as images from the past bleed into each other and everything is flecked with stars — fine if you like that sort of thing, I’m sure…but if you like that sort of thing, surely you’ve seen lots and lots of similar exercises as good as or better than this one?

I could go on and on, really: why the Tank Girl rip off? The utterly clichéd coma-victim-saved-by-dream-ghost-girl riff? Why a story devoted entirely to the saccharine question, “Wouldn’t it be cute if we drew a cat as a human with cat ears?” And, good lord, if you have to print a sixth-rate “Is-the-android-really-human?” story, please try to pick one that doesn’t end with the protagonist staring up wistfully into the sky thinking to herself: “I don’t know what my future will hold, but I won’t be bound by my past.” That’s just egregious.

The book is almost 450 pages long, and at that length even the most benighted editor is bound to include at least a few decent pieces. Michael Kacar’s Ramen Jiman does a funny take on Iron Chef with some genuinely loopy gags (generations of heifers force-fed red-hot-chili to fulfill their destiny as a component of spicy beef ramen) and very accomplished black and white shonen style art. Gilian Sein Ying Ha’s “Darumafish” features beautifully scratchy but controlled linework, almost as if Edward Gorey had decided to draw shojo. Laura Howell’s “The Bizarre Adventures of Gilbert and Sullivan” made me laugh out loud several times. Gilbert’s mischievous nieces run amok, but Arthur Sullivan is oddly placid. “Even now, they’re filling your trousers with offal and you’re entirely unconcerned,” muses the hyper-deformed and disgruntled librettist. “Woman + My trousers = Good!” exclaims Sullivan. Against such successes, though, you have to balance James Romberger and Marguerite Van Cook’s unforgivably pretentious “Ground Zero-The Wedge,” in which a couple of New York hipsters burble on endlessly about lots of, like, far-out ideas, man, while the trendy, graffiti-inspired art tries desperately to be witty and self-referential. (Look! The characters are pulling up the edge of a panel! That’s so post-modern!)

In the intro, Ilya declares “Best New Manga exists to showcase the best of what’s new from the rising generation of international talent.” If I thought that this were really the best of what the rising generation of international talent had to offer, I’d be seriously depressed. Luckily, all you have to do is glance through, say, Dokebi Bride or Nana or even Bizenghast to know that there’s much superior work out there. Manga doesn’t need Ilya to promote it, and it will suffer no especial harm from having this anthology take its name in vain. Still, it’d be nice to have a title that more accurately reflected the contents. The Mammoth Book of Randomly Selected, Relatively Recent Comics has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?

___________
This review was originally published in the Comics Journal.

Empire of Bland

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Howard Zinn, Mike Konopacki, Paul Buhle
A People’s History of American Empire: A Graphic Adaptation
Metropolitan Books

I decided to review A People’s History of American Empire to answer one burning question: could Zinn possibly be as boring a writer as I remembered?

With some assurance, I can now say that the answer to this question is, decidedly, yes. Mike Konopacki and Paul Buhle have created a graphic adaptation of Zinn’s People’s History of the United States by shortening the text to cover only the last 150 years or so, and then rendering the whole into the easy-reader medium of comics, Nonetheless, the book is an interminable experience : a brutal slog through waist-high drifts of names, dates, and facts, all leading to the same arid exhortations. This volume is, in fact, a perfect mirror image of those deadly texts you were forced to read in school. Like them, A People’s History treats history not as a discipline or a study, or even as a story, but rather as a didactic, infallible bludgeon. The only difference is that where, say, Thomas Bailey tells you over and over that America was great, Zinn tells you over and over that it isn’t. American Empire even pulls out some of the same gimmicks with which textbooks attempt to disguise their irredeemable blandness — little factoids placed off to the side with a cutesy “Zinnformation” light-bulb logo attached, pseudo-first-person-accounts by random historical figures (Mark Twain, C.I.A. Iraq agent Donald Wilber) etc. etc. Even the cartoon format itself comes across as the grape flavoring on the kaopectate. What precisely, do indifferently drawn images of Zinn in front of a lecture hall add to either our historical knowledge or our enjoyment? Admittedly, American Empire is a good bit shorter than the honking, back-breaking tomes we dole out to high-school kids. Nonetheless, it fulfills the main requirement of the genre — try as I might, and despite being paid to do so, I discovered that, like any good textbook, this one was completely unfinishable.

The problem is not that I disagree with Zinn’s politics. On the contrary, I’m a pretty entrenched member of the blame-America-first crowd. I think, like Zinn, that imperialism is a blight and that, for many decades now, the United States has been its most enthusiastic and poisonous promulgator. But even for those who hate their country, unrelenting tales of U.S. perfidy and viciousness quickly become wearisome. Once you’ve seen one C.I.A.-backed slaughter of innocent civilians, you’ve kind of seen them all. It’s a horrible thing to say, but the atrocities in Zinn’s books, as in those of that other progressive superstar Noam Chomsky, quickly become, not so much numbing, as simply dull. When we’re jetting from Wounded Knee to Vietnam to Selma to Mexico to Iraq to Nicaragua and on and on, it’s hard to keep the names of the victims straight, much less care about their plight.

Crafting snoozeworthy material out of burning monks and butchered children is no easy task. Zinn does it the way textbook writers usually do — by being a lousy writer and a worse historian. The thing is, history isn’t a list of facts and dates. It’s a method for studying the past that relies on careful use of sources, weighing of evidence, and arguments. This last is especially important — there is always more than one way of looking at any particular event, and the push and pull of competing interpretations is what gives the past it’s interest and depth. Zinn has an all-purpose explanation for everything bad that’s ever happened —corporations did it. I don’t deny that there’s truth there, but it’s not the only truth, and reiterating it with such pat conviction goes a long way towards making it false. The boredom this book engenders is a defensive reaction; when one is being lied to so assiduously, one tends to instinctively recoil.

Here’s one example. In Zinn’s discussion of Hiroshima, he insists that the U.S. dropped the bomb as “a warning to the Soviet Union to stay out of Japan.” Hiroshima was, in other words, an imperial act — the first move in the American Cold War push for global domination. This is a fairly typical leftist theory, but I’ve never really bought it. Looking back from the post-Cold War world, it’s easy to believe that Russia was the focus of U.S. policy. At the time, however, Truman was probably thinking a whole lot more about Japan — the nation against which we were, after all, at war. That war had been incredibly costly; victory had by no means been assured, and there was every reason to believe that a land battle for the Japanese home islands would be horrific. Virtually every combatant nation in the war — including, most certainly, the Japanese — had already shown itself willing to kill civilians with impunity. The atomic bomb wasn’t really all that much of an escalation from, say, the firebombing of Dresden. Based on my own reading, Truman seems to have used the atom bomb because it was there, because we were at war, and because, when you’re at war, you use the weapons you’ve got. This tells you something about the logical outcome of warfare and about the consequences of power. But it tells you little about imperialism or capitalism per se. It’s a parable about Moloch, not Mammon.

Zinn’s account is flat not because he doesn’t agree with me, but because he doesn’t confront any opposition at all. Other than sneering at Truman’s palpably absurd contention that he tried to avoid killing civilians, Zinn never engages with the many, many scholars who have argued over the years about the rights and wrongs of the Hiroshima decision. Without these other voices, it’s difficult to see what’s at stake. The result is blinkered history, which wanders around bumping into trees while nattering on about the forest. In discussing the Cuban revolution, the decidedly un-militaristic Zinn is thus able to denigrate the idea of civilian control of the armed forces without appearing to even realize what he’s doing. In discussing U.S. China policy, he blithely identifies Mao as “a wartime ally against fascism” without ever raising the thorny question of whether it would really have been a great idea for the U.S. to back the man who became one of the most successful mass murderers in history. Part of the trouble here is that Zinn is trying to cover so much material so quickly that he can’t really stop to think about anything. But this is just another way of saying that his whole textbook-project is intellectually, and, as a consequence, morally, bankrupt. History without thought is an abomination. It should be driven from the earth, the classrooms where it is perpetrated should be razed to dust, and the ground where they stood salted.

The central evil of Zinn’s book stems, it seems to me, precisely from his inability to listen to what the other side has to say. Zinn tells us over and over that imperialism is driven by capital’s search for new markets, and by it’s desire to deflect unrest at home. But his commitment to this canard, and his general breakneck pace, prevents him from taking seriously what imperialists themselves actually contend they are about. From Rudyard Kipling to Christopher Hitchens, the rationale for empire has remained remarkably similar. We’re over there, not to exploit the little brown people, but to help them, for they are degraded and suffering. The argument for imperialism is, in other words, a progressive argument, built on exactly the kind of empathy for innocent pain, and on the same sort of outrage against oppression, in which Zinn himself traffics. This is why, when the father of investigative journalism, Bartoleme de las Casas protested Spanish atrocities in the new world, he helped his career a great deal, and the Indians precious little. The conscience of imperialism is still part of imperialism, and the ostentatious wringing of the left hand is a fine way to distract attention from the atrocities committed with the right. The opposite of empire, rhetorically, is not one-world socialism, but the brand of isolationism in vogue among über-nationalist nutcases like the John Birch Society. It’s not an accident that the most effective anti-imperialist ideology currently going is militant Islam.

The point here is adamantly not that Zinn is a hypocrite. On the contrary, American Empire includes several snippets from its author’s biography, and he seems like an interesting, dedicated, and even noble fellow — one of the few tenured radicals who has actually put his life and career on the line for the cause. He lost his job at Spelman because of his involvement in the anti-segregation movement; he risked indictment by helping Daniel Ellsberg hide the Pentagon Papers. But being a great activist isn’t the same as being a great thinker, and while Zinn may be the first, he is not the second. His exhortation at the end is fairly standard non-denominational humanist jeremiad — “to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of the worst of everything around us, is a marvelous victory.” Maybe. But George W. Bush probably thought something much like that when he bravely defied the opinion of the world and toppled that horrible dictator, Saddam Hussein. Good intentions aren’t going to overthrow imperialism; good intentions are what imperialism thrives on. If you want to end empire, you tend to need nationalism and religion and — unless you’re lucky enough to find a Gandhi — really remarkable quantities of blood. Zinn has no interest in struggling with the unpleasant ramifications of this. As a result, for all its facts and all its good-heartedness, A People’s History is about neither the United States, nor about Empire, but about, precisely, nothing.

Utilitarian Review 1/31/10

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On HU

I started out the week by reviewing the Mike Sekowsky run on Wonder Woman.

The discussion of whether or not manga critics are too nice continued with some snark by m. of coffeeandink and a long, long comments thread.

Kinukitty reviews the yaoi Sense and Sexuality.

Suat talked about problems with Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms. There’s a long comment thread as well, with Kate Dacey, Jog, Derik Badman, Bill Randall and others commenting.

Vom Marlowe reviews a good white ink.

Utilitarians Elsewhere

At the Chicago Reader I reviewed Garry Wills’ new book Bomb Power.

There’s no doubt that the bomb and nuclear fears are regularly marshaled in defense of unlimited executive power. And Wills makes a good case that the Manhattan Project provided institutional impetus for, and training in, federal secrecy. But his claim that the bomb “caused a violent break in our whole government” is less persuasive.

He argues, for instance, that our foreign policy following World War II was in large part predicated on our need for missile bases—a claim I don’t see any reason to dispute. But in the course of that argument he also states that the need for bases “began a long history of friendly relations with dictators.” This neatly elides America’s extended, inglorious prebomb encouragement of tyrannies abroad, starting with our support for the slave-holding regime in 18th-century Haiti and finding perhaps its most spectacular expression in our brutal and extended battle against a popular insurgency in the Philippines in the early 1900s.

At metropulse I review a number of recent Thai luk thung release.

Luk thung is often characterized as Thai country music, which is both accurate and misleading. It’s accurate in that, yes, luk thung is mostly created and consumed by folks from rural backgrounds, and its lyrics reflect their concerns—the love left at home, the joys of rural cooking, the shock of moving to the city and discovering that your new urban flame is a he rather than a she, etc.

It’s misleading, though, in that luk thung doesn’t sound anything like country music. It sounds like film music exotica. Also garage rock. And like J-pop and Bollywood and AM radio balladry. And like hip-hop. In other words, and very much unlike American country, luk thung is almost pathologically omnivorous.

Bert Stabler and I discuss Inglorious Bastards and Zizek and other things.

At tcj.com I review two crappy manga: Biomega and Ikigami.

At Madeloud I review Drudkh’s fantastic first album, Forgotten Legends.

Breaking News: Manga Critics Not Nice!

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During our xxxholic roundtable last week, Suat intimated that manga critics were too nice. M. at coffeeandink, in a post titled: “Summary of some recent comments in a discussion of manga, refutes him thus:

GUY #1: Manga critics are much too nice and praise substandard work. Naturally, I feel no need to provide any evidence of this contention. Maybe it is because of all the girls.

GUY #2: Yeah, I don’t like any manga. Even when it’s good, it’s made for girls. No, wait, I do like one manga — it is by a man, and about stereotypical guy stuff. Since it is male, it is gender-neutral, unlike yaoi or shojo, which people only seem to like for political reasons. My reasons for liking things are completely apolitical and entirely justified by intellectual arguments. When women write in detail about relationships, it’s just not aimed at me. When men write in detail about relationships, it shows complex emotional realism.

Also, why don’t you ever talk about boys’ comics?

GUY #2: Once again, I must assert that people are lying about their opinions of manga for political reasons, without evidence or example, and my list of all male great comics artists is completely without political bias. Also, I am going to cite Osamu Tezuka as a great comics artist, even though his career and oeuvre actually contradict everything else I’ve been claiming about audience and identification.

GUY #2: Wait, I haven’t named enough great male comics artists yet.

I am going to continue to assume that girls’ comics = comics about romance is such an obvious statement that it will inform all my thinking and yet never need to be clearly stated.

GUY #1: Whether situations are realistic, how intellectual they are, and how deeply invested the reader becomes in the story are totally objective metrics that are completely independent of all individual tastes and socio-cultural influences.

GUY #3: The problem is an age bias, not just a gender bias. To prove this, for the rest of this comment, I will only talk about comics written by men.

I would submit that this is truly high class snark, and not even a little bit nice.

I had a back and forth discussion with m that I thought I’d reproduce here, at least in part.

Me: I did want to point out though, that, whatever their failings, Suat and Matthias, were both very open to dialogue, and unfailingly polite when contradicted (as, indeed, were people like Melinda and VM with whom they were arguing.)

m: …comments like Suat and Matthias’ are why I basically gave up on looking at comics or manga blogs not specifically recommended by friends. You characterize Suat and Matthias as “very open to dialogue, and unfailingly polite when contradicted,” and indeed they seemed respectful of the people to whom they were directly speaking. But their comments are not open, polite, or respectful; their comments are extremely sexist. By this I don’t mean that they hate women or spoke with any malice or ill intent; I mean that their comments treated men’s responses and men’s experiences as the default and characterized women’s responses and experiences as deviations from the normal, special exceptions, and less meaningful or authoritative than men’s experiences.

They are hardly the worst cases of this I’ve seen, particularly in the comics blogosphere, but I’m not sure you understand the weariness that comes from encountering this over and over and over again–even in cases, such as this one, where these voices are not in the majority. Ultimately, it was a lot less painful and exhausting for me to stick to a different set of blogs and communities, where the readers and writers did not by default consider women’s writing or women’s reading less significant or less interesting than men’s.

Me: I’ve engaged in a number of irritating interactions with mainstream and arts comics readers on behalf of shojo and manga, so I have some sense of how wearying it is to have the same argument over and over — though, obviously, not being a woman, I’m probably not as personally infuriated. In any case, I certainly understand the impulse not to want to engage with that sort of thing. You certainly have no responsibility to tell people they’re wrong on the internet. I wish I was less prone to do that myself, honestly.

Nonetheless, for me — and I’m coming from a slightly different place, as I said — I think it’s worthwhile to try to have people from different kinds of communities talk to each other. That’s going to entail some (though not necessarily equal, alas) frustration for everyone. But I think the results can also be worthwhile — and seemed to me to be so in this case, where the back and forth was fascinating, and brought up a number of really interesting points (I thought Shaenon and Kristy in particular were fascinating on why they felt manga was worthwhile and/or different from Western comics.)

Along those lines, I think its useful to make some distinctions at least. I think calling Matthias’ and Suat’s comments “extremely sexist” is a bit harsh. It’s not hard to find extreme sexism on the web or in life, alas, but does this really qualify? Neither Suat nor Matthias dismisses women’s writing out of hand; in fact, both have read a fair bit of shojo and acknowledge some of its virtues, despite their reservations. Neither categorically dismisses either women’s writing or romance — in fact, elsewhere in comments, Suat basically says his problem with xxxholic isn’t that it is romance, but that it didn’t move him to tears. Both Matthias and Suat express an eagerness to read more by women critics and to think about these issues in greater depth. Suat linked to Melinda Beasi at the end of his original post; Matthias pressed VM for links (and she linked you, among others.)

I just feel like both Matthias and Suat were very much trying to meet their interlocutors halfway — as indeed, were folks like Melinda and Shaenon and VM. I think that’s worth something, and worth respecting, even if, at the end of the day, my own views are much closer to yours than to theirs.

You can read the whole thing, along with some interesting comments from other folks, at M.’s page here.